Discrepancies Between Art Historical and Psychoanalytic
Interpretations of Avant-Garde Painting: Fry and Greenberg contra Balint and
Fairbairn by Donald Kuspit

What do Fry and Greenberg
have to say about Surrealism and more broadly modern art? Fry has nothing to
say about Surrealism, but a good deal to say about modern art, particularly
Cézanne’s paintings and more broadly Post-Impressionism, both of which he
supported, celebrated, and analyzed. The term Post-Impressionism is his, and he
put on the first exhibition of Post-Impressionism in the UK. For Fry, as for
Greenberg, avant-garde painting is about “the handwriting of the brush,” and
“the peculiar density and resistance” and even “sensual energy”--”austere
voluptuousness,” Fry also calls it-- “pigment” can achieve.(3) Avant-garde
painting is about “the abstract intelligibility” achieved by its “varying and
shifting texture” and the “building up of sequence of planes which has a direct
‘musical’ effect on the feelings.” In avant-garde painting “changes of colour
correspond to movements of planes.” There is “a new exaltation in the colour”
and “impetuosity in the rhythm,” with no loss of “pictorial architecture.”
Indeed, such exaltation and impetuosity make it more “impressive.” In other
words, what matters in avant-garde painting, as Greenberg says--he calls it
modernist painting to distinguish it from modern painting in general--is the
realization of “formal facts” achieved through the handling of the material
medium of paint. This realization gives it ontological poignancy and evocative
power. But above all the avant-garde painting must meet what Greenberg calls
the “aesthetic test.” It “boils down to a determination of...internal
coherence...and of the appropriateness of the artistic means to the abstract
content.”(4). It is worth emphasizing that Greenberg thinks “that every work of
art has an unconscious or pre-conscious effect, and this effect also constitutes
part of its content.” And it is also worth emphasizing that for Greenberg it is
only abstract content--which Fairbairn and Balint ignore--that has unconscious
or pre-conscious effect. The representation has conscious effect, which is why
from Greenberg’s and Fry’s point of view it is superficial and secondary, that
is, not the serious esthetic content of the work. Also, for both, “the means
are content,” as Greenberg says,(5) and thus have unconscious or pre-conscious
effect. What seems like the obvious content of Dali’s Specter of Sex Appeal--the
representation of the figures and the scene as a whole--is of minor “literary”
interest, as Greenberg says. Thus what matters is not the objects that are
pictured and their associations, but the way the picture is painted.

Fry doesn’t deal with
Surrealism and Greenberg dismisses it as “a certain return to the
human-all-too-human, too obvious emotion”--”pessimistic hedonism,” Greenberg
calls it(6)--”and academic subterfuges.”(7) For both it is a pictorial
narrative art lacking esthetic subtlety and significance. I disagree with
Greenberg, but his point is well-taken: Surrealism comes across first and
foremost as bizarre picture making and metaphoric manipulation. This precludes
attending to its abstract qualities, indeed, the innovative artistic means it
uses to generate pre-conscious and unconscious effect, for example, frottage,
decolomania, and collage, used more extensively than in Cubism. All involve the
exploitation and manipulation of new artistic mediums. Thus attention to the
formal sophistication of Surrealist art has been sidetracked by attention to its
absurd and unprecedented representations.

The difference between the
psychoanalytic and esthetic approaches to avant-garde painting is made
particularly clear by their different readings of Van Gogh’s brushwork.
Fairbairn explicitly calls it sadistic, while Greenberg thinks such vigorous
brushwork can “rival sculpture in the evocation of the tactile.”(8) More
broadly, it is a gestural assertion of the paint medium for its own dynamic
sake, a sort of literalization of l’art pour l’art. It may have profound
pre-conscious and unconscious effect, but this expressive order of effects is
secondary to what Greenberg calls the literal order of effects. They are
conspicuous and can be studied, and evaluated in art historical and esthetic
terms, whereas the expressive order of effects is unclear and hard to study and
evaluate, and not esthetically relevant. I think this is a major difficulty in
Greenberg’s thinking. He contradicts himself: “art...can now tell the truth
about feeling by turning to the abstract,” he writes,(9) but if it is hard to
fathom feeling one cannot know the truth about it.